Checking for this, i see that the only one was the old unshort.link, but the repo was discontinued
I’m sure there are better alternatives (going to look at some of the other suggestions here), but I usually just drop the link into https://www.expandurl.net/
I developed this script for creating permanent/static archives of social media exports, so it’s not a full solution - not a web service, expects file inputs, uses a probably incomplete list of shorteners to avoid pulling real pages - but it along with the
shorteners.txtfile in the same repository, iterating to find a domain not on the list, might at least inspire a solution, if it’s not good for your specific cases.I understand this is not exactly what you’re asking for, but if you have access to a terminal, you can “unshorten” a link with:
curl --head -L https://example.com/short | grep: locationIt is not enough for the increasingly common share.google links for example, and i bet there’s more like this
Received a share.google link and checked what it did: It redirects to something with URL format “https://www.google.com/share.google?q=SOME_CODE”, which is a normal page that IS the target as far as curl and such tools are concerned but redirects on the browser probably using Javascript, so it will not redirect it with our normal tools. It will need custom code or Javascript execution. So, they knew what they were doing and used their powers for evil, as they usually do now.
I’ve not used it, but your question got me wondering so I searched and found the following site which tries to navigate various redirect methods to find the final destination. I’d be curious to know how well it works.
I was hoping for a self-hosted resource, not a remote API, since this is the Selfhosted community
Whoops, my mistake. I did not check where this was posted. Sorry about that.
